The Weight We Carry

“It isn’t the bags that drag you down—it’s the pieces of home stitched into them, and the silence they leave behind.”

Each step through the fine, powdery sand pressed deeper than the last, as though the ground itself wanted to claim me.

The straps of the bags cut into my hands, their weight dragging at my shoulders—anchors tethering me to the old world even as I trudged further into the new. The scrape and tug behind me left uneven furrows in the dust, an accidental testimony to the effort it took to bring fragments of Earth into Clivilius. Every few metres I shifted my grip, redistributing the strain, feeling the protest in my wrists and the ache beginning to settle between my shoulder blades.

Paul's weekend bag swung against my left hip. Jamie's suitcase—heavier, packed with careful folds of his shirts and trousers—dragged behind me on its wheels, though the wheels were useless in this terrain. The dust clogged them almost immediately, and what should have rolled instead scraped and juddered across the ground like something wounded.

Then, as the tent emerged from the pale glare ahead, a current of pride surged through me.

Its angular shape broke the monotony of the horizon, the canvas walls taut and purposeful against the endless sweep of dust. It looked improbable and yet steadfast—an assertion of our presence, our claim, a mark of human hands against the untouched. The afternoon light caught the fabric and made it glow faintly, almost warm, as if it were already absorbing something of the Clivilian sun and making it its own.

I had seen it half-finished earlier, a skeleton of poles and drooping canvas. Now it stood complete, or near enough—a proper structure with walls and a roof and what looked like a vestibule at the front. Not a home, not yet, but the beginning of one.

"The tent looks amazing!" I called, unable to hold the words back.

My voice rang across the open air, carried easily by the soft hum of the breeze. The sight stirred something I hadn't expected: hope, fragile but insistent, like the first green shoot breaking through cracked earth. Not the grandiose hope of civilisations built and destinies fulfilled, but something smaller and more immediate—the hope that we might actually survive this.

"Is it finished now?"

"Pretty much," Jamie replied.

His tone was casual, but beneath it lay a thread of pride that softened the edge of his words. He stepped forward, and I caught the flex of muscle under his shirt as he reached for his suitcase, taking it from me with effortless certainty. Paul mirrored him, his hand closing around his own bag in a single motion.

Just like that, the burden I'd carried across the frontier passed into their hands.

The relief was immediate—my shoulders lifted, my fingers uncurled, blood rushing back into the creased lines where the straps had pressed. But there was something else too, something harder to name. A reluctance to let go, perhaps. As long as I was the one carrying, I was the one in control. The moment the bags left my grip, a fraction of that control went with them.

"Duke misses you," I ventured, the words heavier than they sounded.

For a moment, my gaze locked with Jamie's—a brief, magnetic connection that made my chest tighten. The unspoken things between us crowded into that silence: the lies, the evasions, the currents neither of us could name aloud. All the words we hadn't said, all the questions we hadn't asked, all the anger and hurt and bewildered love that tangled between us like threads too knotted to pull apart.

My eyes fell, unable to hold his, tracing instead the dust that now clung to my shoes. Alien grains caught in the creases of something once so ordinary.

"He knew as soon as I got the suitcase out that you were going away."

The change in Jamie was subtle but undeniable.

His shoulders, so square and sure a moment before, slumped as though some invisible weight had pressed down upon him. The proud lines of his posture softened, bent under the reminder of what had been left behind. For all his fury, for all his caustic refusal to bend, Jamie loved that dog with a tenderness he rarely showed to humans.

Duke was perhaps the only creature on Earth—or off it—who had never disappointed him.

"I miss him too," he murmured.

The words came low, almost reluctant, but their weight was unmistakable. Something cracked open in his voice, just for a moment—a glimpse of the man beneath the armour of resentment. The man who had chosen Duke from a litter of wriggling puppies, who had spent weeks training him with patient repetition, who still let the little creature sleep at the foot of our bed.

That Jamie was still in there, somewhere beneath the anger. I had to believe that. I had to.

The silence that followed Jamie's words clung to us, thick and resonant, like a veil of dust that refused to settle.

My own thoughts curled inward, restless with the weight of what hadn't been said. The gulf between us felt both impossibly wide and achingly narrow—close enough to reach across, if either of us had the courage. But neither of us moved. Neither of us spoke.

Then Paul's voice cut cleanly through it, breaking the spell with his characteristic bluntness.

"Take these back with you," he said, his tone authoritative yet not unkind, as he pushed several black garbage bags in my direction.

The plastic crackled as they shifted, their ungainly shapes collapsing against one another. They were stuffed full—packaging materials, I assumed, from the tent assembly. Perhaps the remnants of whatever food they'd eaten. The detritus of survival, already accumulating.

I eyed the bags sceptically, my brow knitting. The sheer size of them felt absurd, as though Paul had never seen the narrow confines of the wheelie bin back home.

"I don't think the bin will fit both of those."

"I'm sure you'll think of something," Paul encouraged.

His voice carried that same immovable confidence he always seemed to wield, a tone that managed to reassure and pressurise at once. It was both a compliment and a challenge, as if he believed utterly in my ability to conjure solutions out of thin air and would accept nothing less. That was Paul in a nutshell—faith wrapped in expectation, trust that doubled as demand.

"We've also made a small pile of cardboard and stuff we can burn, over there," he added, nodding towards a haphazard stack just off to the right of the tent.

I followed his gesture, noting the untidy mound of boxes and scraps. Already they were thinking ahead, separating combustible material for fires, creating systems where chaos had been. The sight pleased me more than it probably should have.

I couldn't help but smile at his words, the reaction tugged out of me before I had the chance to hold it back.

Even here, in this impossible place, Paul's optimism burned steady—a light refusing to bow to alien skies. It was a trait that had carried him through countless storms, that same unshakeable belief that problems existed only to be solved and tomorrow would always arrive bearing gifts. My brother the builder, the doer, the man who saw obstacles as invitations.

And yet, beneath my smile, another layer stirred.

His faith in me, so unflinching, was also leverage. Confidence became a currency in its own right, one I could choose to spend or hoard. Paul might see light in the darkest of situations, but I was already calculating the angles of the shadows—quietly shaping how that light could best be bent to serve what lay ahead.

It wasn't cruelty. Not exactly. It was survival, dressed in the clothes of foresight. I told myself that, anyway. The alternative—that I was manipulating my own brother, using his trust as a tool—was a thought I preferred to leave folded away, tucked into the same dark corner where I kept all the other uncomfortable truths about myself.

For now, I gathered the garbage bags into my arms, their bulk awkward against my chest.

"I'll figure something out," I said, and the words carried more weight than either of them could know.